Maternal mental health issues are pervasive in rural China, yet community-based interventions are scarce. To address this gap, we developed the Thinking Healthy Extended Program, a nonspecialist-led intervention designed to promote mental health among female caregivers of children under the age of three, including mothers and grandmothers, in resource-constrained areas of China. Drawing on an adapted Stages of Implementation Science framework, this study describes the Exploration and Installation phases of a four-phase intervention development process. During the Exploration phase, we assessed caregivers’ mental health needs and preferences for intervention delivery through in-depth interviews. The Installation phase comprised three stages: developing the overall curriculum structure, identifying and validating curriculum topics, and integrating these topics into a comprehensive curriculum based on feedback from interviews, focus group discussions, and cognitive walkthroughs. The development process took place from 2022 to 2024 in a prefecture in southwestern China and involved 73 caregivers of children aged 6-36 months. The resulting 24-session curriculum integrates simplified cognitive reframing techniques, behavioral activation, caregiving skills, and peer support. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a systematic and participatory approach to developing a mental health intervention for low-resource populations.

Theories of democratic diffusion predict that exposure to liberal democracies fosters support for political liberalism, while recent studies on Chinese overseas students suggest studying abroad generates backlash against liberal values. Using a unique four-year longitudinal dataset of nearly 1,000 Chinese college students in China and the United States, we examine how studying abroad shapes students’ ideology, attitudes, and identity. Our findings challenge both perspectives. Students who study in the United States are already more politically liberal, market-oriented, and cosmopolitan, and less nationalistic than their peers upon departure, underscoring the importance of selection. Ideological preferences remain remarkably stable throughout college, regardless of location. However, support for China’s political system and affective identification with Chinese national identity declines among students in both countries from 2022 to 2023, with a greater decline among students in the United States. These results show that selection, home-country shocks, and host-country context jointly shape overseas students’ political attitudes.

Could the global transition to renewable energy create a green dilemma that pits carbon reduction against biodiversity conservation? This study examined the effect of policies promoting solar photovoltaics on local avian biodiversity using a panel dataset covering 2344 counties in China from 2014 to 2023. Policies that favored photovoltaic expansion led to reductions in bird diversity, disproportionately affecting wealthier and nondesert regions, as well as widespread species. The mechanism operated primarily through land conversion: Cropland and grassland were transformed into developed areas, reducing the diversity of vegetation. Paradoxically, the leaf area index increased, a pattern we term “inferior greening,” whereby diverse natural landscapes were replaced by dense but ecologically homogeneous vegetation. We argue that future photovoltaic development should be accompanied by strict biodiversity safeguards, especially in economically developed regions with high habitat complexity.

Background
Mental health problems among young children have become a common public health issue worldwide. As the family plays a crucial role in creating a favorable environment for children’s mental health, the parenting style of caregivers is a key factor related to children’s mental health issues. This study aims to examine the associations between parenting styles of primary caregivers and the mental health of their primary school child in rural China and identifies the factors that may influence the adoption of different parenting styles.

Methods
Data were collected from 1,298 primary school children (aged 9–11) and their primary caregivers in northwestern China. The primary caregivers completed the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and a socio-demographic questionnaire. The cognitive development of children was measured using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Fourth Edition, and the non-cognitive development of children was evaluated using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social-Emotional. We performed descriptive statistics, linear regression analysis, and multivariable regression analysis.

Results
Our data showed that 17% of the sampled children exhibited total difficulty problems. The results indicated that authoritative parenting style was negatively associated with child mental health problems. In contrast, authoritarian parenting style was positively associated with child mental health problems. Analysis of combined parenting styles revealed that the combinations that included relatively more intensive authoritative parenting styles was associated with reduced incidence of child mental health problems. In contrast, the combinations that were found to have relatively more authoritarian parenting styles were associated with higher rates of mental health issues among children. Demographic characteristics, such as child gender, child developmental outcomes, child attending preschools, identity of primary caregiver, and family economic status, that were associated with the adoption of different parenting styles.

Conclusions
The study indicates that an authoritative parenting style is positively associated child mental health outcomes. Likewise, when authoritative strategies are more prominent within combined parenting styles, the likelihood that a child will experience mental health problems decreases. In contrast, the more dominant authoritarian behaviors are, the greater the risk of child mental health problems. Therefore, primary caregivers should be encouraged to adopt more positive parenting styles, which can help promote better outcomes of child mental health.

Jing Tian ^1,2, Lei Wang ^1,✉, Steven Sun Zhao ³, Sicong Li ⁴, Zekai Fu ⁵, Scott Rozelle ⁶

We study the optimal design of trade and industrial policy when governments pursue environmental objectives alongside traditional national welfare. Motivated by the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and growing concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and the environment, we develop a framework in which policymakers choose tariffs and domestic production subsidies to maximize national welfare, defined as the sum of consumer surplus, domestic profits, environmental benefits, and tariff revenue net of subsidies. We combine a theoretical model of differentiated-product oligopoly with a structural demand model estimated using vehicle-level data from 13 countries during 2004-2023 that together account for the vast majority of global EV sales. Our central finding is that the optimal policy combines a moderate tariff on imported EVs with a subsidy to domestic EV production financed through tariff revenue. This policy substantially outperforms both outright protectionism and laissez-faire. Relative to current policies, it preserves consumer access to affordable EVs, accelerates fleet electrification, supports domestic producers, and remains budget-neutral. For the United States, the optimal policy more than doubles EV market share, generates over $45 billion in annual welfare gains, and avoids approximately 95 million tons of lifetime CO2 emissions. A key mechanism underlying these results is the pass-through of tariffs and subsidies to prices, which depends critically on demand curvature, product substitution, and market structure. More broadly, our results suggest that effective industrial policy requires careful attention to market structure and country-specific conditions, balancing consumer, producer, fiscal, and environmental objectives rather than adhering to ideological prescriptions.

This paper exploits the universe of credit- and debit-card transactions in China during 2013–2015 and provides the first nationwide analysis of the health care cost of PM2.5 for a developing country. We leverage spatial spillovers of PM2.5 from long-range transport to generate exogenous variation in local pollution, and we employ a flexible distributed lag model to capture semiparametrically the dynamic response of pollution exposure. We find significant impacts of PM2.5 on health care spending in both the short and medium terms. A 10 g/m decrease in PM2.5 would reduce annual health care spending by over $9.2 billion, about 1.5% of China’s annual health care expenditure.